This Blog

There are 100 million young people in the Middle East and North Africa. They are a force for change in a region at a crossroads. This blog is focused on ideas for tapping into this immense potential and meeting the aspirations for jobs, justice and dignity.

Labor and Social Protection

The poorest country in the Middle East and North Africa even prior to the conflict, Yemen has through violence and subsequent economic freefall landed at the epicenter of a series of interrelated emergencies that the United Nations describes as the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis.” This is the first of a three-part blog series on the Bank’s response in Yemen.

In July of this year, I assumed the role of Country Manager for Yemen. Much has happened in my first 100 days as CM.

Many of us move in circles where we take our mobility across borders for granted. The pull of a better education or a higher paying job has taken so many of us far away from home. Beyond our personal experiences, at the World Bank we’ve made the case on the benefits of greater mobility and we’re walking the talk. Using economist’s jargon of “improving resource allocation,” “matching supply and demand,” or “responding to economic and demographic forces,” we want to demonstrate that mobility can be a potent instrument to unlock prosperity, alleviate unemployment, and boost investment in building the human capital.

About a decade ago, we started a project to improve solid waste management for waste pickers like Ibrahim and the 840,000 people in the southern West Bank governorates of Bethlehem and Hebron. One of the project components included the closure of the Yatta dumpsite, where illegally dumped and burned household waste was reaching a very unsanitary and hazardous level.

But here came the challenge.

While the closure of the dumpsite would mean putting an end to a serious environmental and public health problem, it was terrible news for the waste pickers and their families. It meant that the livelihoods of those families would come to an end.

Although employment is usually seen as a resource for women’s empowerment, it does not automatically translate into better status and lower rates of violence for women. In fact, in some settings, if gendered norms that support men’s violence against women are not addressed, the economic empowerment of women can inadvertently propagate gender-based violence (GBV). For example, when work is a major defining factor of masculinity, working women may face a greater risk of domestic violence.

Despite a difficult context of political transition and acute economic crisis, post-2011 Tunisia boldly laid the foundations for social dialogue. It allowed the government and key social actors to achieve a consensus on the country’s strategic direction. The 2013 Social Contract addressed the crucial challenge of social inclusion, with the need to target subsidies more effectively to make room in the budget for social investments. This included improving the targeting and coverage of the social safety net program – the Program for Needy Families-PNAFEN. In addition, for the first time, the government’s 2016-20 Five-Year Plan makes inclusion a strategic priority and lays out a vision for building a minimum social protection floor for all.

Landing a job after college can be difficult anywhere, but it is especially hard in conflict-affected economies, such as Palestine. Joblessness and job insecurity are an unfortunate reality for too many young Palestinians.

Well, what other title could you possibly give this post? This photograph is of a group of young Moroccan men and women, gathered here to meet with their potential German employers. Where? … in Casablanca of course!

It was December 8, 2010, when I boarded a plane after a routine trip to Tunisia. There was nothing out of the ordinary that would have provided a clue as to the dramatic upheaval to come. The taxi drivers rarely spoke of politics, poverty was an untouchable topic of conversation, and YouTube was blocked. However, over the course of that winter, uprisings erupted throughout Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and beyond that called for greater social justice. Investment policies had privileged elites for too long. Social and labor policies had not been that effective at promoting inclusiveness. Each country has since struggled to maintain political stability while addressing demands for improving work and welfare, with mixed results.

The Arab world is in the midst of one of the largest human displacements in modern history, with 14-15 million refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs). This number includes over 10 million Syrians that are now refugees abroad or IDPs, nearly 2 million Iraqi IDPs, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees most of whom fled to Syria. There are 2 million Libyans abroad, mostly in Tunisia, and 400,000 IDPs within the country. The region is also prone to sudden population movements such as the hurried return of hundreds of thousands of Egyptians from Libya, first when fighting intensified over the summer and then following the barbaric beheading of 21 Egyptians.